Before taking his life, he wrote a letter to a member of the faculty, photography teacher Al Ferreira. This forced Ferreira to examine his own identity as a closeted man. He also recognized the immense need for an outlet for LGBT young people and high school students and therefore came out as a gay man and led the charge as CRLS created the first gay/straight alliance in the northeast.

Incorporated since 1996 and in existence since 1988, Project 10 East has a strong track record of helping create substantive change benefiting the diverse group of young people with whom we work. Programming created with the assistance of then Executive Director Christine Markowski catapulted Project 10 East to become a nonprofit stronghold in New England, working to service LGBT young people. During the first few years of its existence, the Project worked with several specific communities directly in the schools while also exploring community based and statewide efforts to assist LGBT youth. As is consistent with our continued efforts, our work evolved over time while always keeping in mind the best interest and needs of the young people.

Our main tool is starting and supporting gay/straight alliances (GSAs) in Massachusetts’s public and private high schools. GSAs are after-school organizations that allow young people to come together in a safe environment where they can talk about issues related to sexual orientation in order to help change the climate of a school. By examining the common roots of oppression, GSAs inspire young people to forge bonds across communities and to work together to fight all forms of injustice. GSAs help students brainstorm ways to answer the taunts, slurs, physical violence, and other acts of anti-gay aggression they may face without escalating the situation. Further, GSAs push teachers and other faculty to become more inclusive not only in the language they use, but also in the curriculum they adopt to create a school environment that acknowledges and reflects the actual diversity of the student, parent, and staff populations.

Since 1996, Every week Project 10 East sends trained adult facilitators into schools with struggling GSAs to help establish and mediate meetings, and to provide assistance to faculty and staff. Our goal is to help such schools establish strong foundations that will eventually allow their GSAs to be self-sustaining. The type of assistance offered is necessarily dictated by the particular needs of the students and school. In addition to our work helping to establish GSAs, we coordinate events, including field trips and conferences where young people meet one another and pursue social justice work. For example, for the past 6 years we have brought several vans full of young people down to Hartford, Connecticut to attend the annual True Colors Conference, one of the largest GLBT conferences in New England. Project 10 has trained students to run several workshops on topics including how racism and classism tie into homophobia. We provide practical skills that these young people will need to confront homophobia in their own lives, as well as to become future leaders in the quest for a more just society. We offer instruction in public speaking, community organizing, project management, fundraising, web design, and confidence building. With these tools, youth become empowered to take charge of their own lives, helping to create a world free from homophobia and marked by equality for all people.

Over the past several years, Project 10 East has been under the leadership of Executive Director Ashlee Reed. During this time, Project 10 East has continued to serve the needs of young people around Massachusetts, while focusing on the specific needs of the LGBT youth of color population in Boston. Project 10 East staff and board members saw the specific needs of this underserved population and began to develop programming that would be more inclusive of diverse backgrounds. During the summer of 2005, staff, board members, and volunteers successfully completed this task. A pilot program is being launched this fall and statewide implementation of the Project 10 East GSA curriculum is planned for the fall of 2006.

By working to eradicate all forms of prejudice, Project 10 East is a grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated to creating safe space for young people in their schools and communities. Our particular emphasis is to meet the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered (LGBT) youth. Too often, these young people are stigmatized simply because of their sexuality. Some become victims of verbal or physical abuse in school or in their homes; they may encounter community or familial disapproval; the suicide rates for LGBT youth are more than three times that of their peers. Compounding the effects of homophobia, other oppressions (racism, classism, and sexism) leave these youth even more vulnerable.